“I reached the end of How to Escape from a Leper Colony with the exhilarating sense that
I had been on the best kind of journey—not,
finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully
talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.”
—MARGOT LIVESEY, THE BOSTON GLOBE
“I can’t remember a debut
that was quite so assured. . . . It is easy to imagine Yanique’s characters
in an adaptation for the stage: think ‘Our Town,’ set in the Caribbean, but
with raw language and stories full of violence and sexuality. Plus it’s funny,
too. Are you listening, Oprah?”
—THE
BOSTON GLOBE, “16 up-and-comers who might make it
big in 2010”
“Tiphanie Yanique captures single moments
from a variety of perspectives that illuminate those instants in surprising
ways. . . . Yanique’s skill lies in
taking quick glimpses of people and situations and progressively deepening the
relief in which they are portrayed.”
—HARPER’S
MAGAZINE
“To wrap your mind around life on an island, you need to
understand insularity, restlessness, the way it feels to have a fluid sense of
identity. All this and more is what you get from Tiphanie Yanique’s haunting and vibrant debut fiction
collection.”
—O, THE OPRAH
MAGAZINE
“A skillfully crafted collection of short stories that
offer ample rewards—vivid
characterizations, evocative language—at their finish lines. . . . Unlike a
good deal of multicultural fiction, Yanique’s
stories look beyond mere ethnicity to locate the subtler strands of human
identity.”
—BOOKFORUM
“The effects of
colonialism throb in Yanique’s vivid debut collection. . . Yanique
penetrates the perils and pleasures of lives lived outside resort walls.”
—PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY
“With turns to the wild, clever, and magical
that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a
beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new
voice.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT
“Tiphanie Yanique is a writer to watch. Although How to Escape from a Leper Colony is her
debut, she writes with the wisdom and confidence of an old soul. The
title story alone is worth the price of admission, but each of the stories
contained in this gorgeous collection is clear-eyed, honest while still zinging
with emotion. Tiphanie Yanique is blessed with an electric imagination,
an expansive heart, and an unflinching gaze. I can't wait to see what she
does next.”
—TAYARI JONES
“These are fiercely original, poetic, and bold stories
from a writer who is a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute of
this book and was in awe of nearly every paragraph.”
—CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ,
author of The World in Half
“In these powerful, poetic stories set in landscapes real
and imagined, Tiphanie Yanique explores beautifully race, family, and the
complicated movements of the heart.”
—CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI,author of Sister of My Heart and The Palace of Illusions
“Let
us hail this new literary voice, vibrant, humorous, original and powerful.
These stories introduce us to a new world free of the old images and too familiar
clichés of the Caribbean.”
—MARYSE CONDE
“In this Widest of Sargasso Seas Tiphanie Yanique gives
us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers’ colony on Chacachacare, off the
coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It’s an astonishing
debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if
Jean Rhys had written it today.”
—ROBERT ANTONI
“Tiphanie Yanique has a gift for writing about physical
displacement and the longing for connection that ensues. The unique
stories in How to Escape from a Leper
Colony meditate on confused expressions of love and spirituality in fresh
and surprising ways.”
—EMILY RABOTEAU
“How to Escape from
a Leper Colony is fiction of the first rank. Tiphanie Yanique explores the
ferociously complex terrain of her native Caribbean to show what it means to
live in a world where accidents of culture, country, history, race, and place
figure so bewilderingly in, as the author puts it, ‘the divine risks of love.’
Every single one of these extraordinary stories delivers a necessary
revelation. So few of us can hope to see with any clarity, much less make sense
of, this world, but Yanique—and we should be profoundly grateful for this—sees
and understands a very great deal indeed.”
—BEN FOUNTAIN
“This splendid debut collection reveals a storyteller of
multiple gifts and ample heart. Yanique’s writing is very fine, her characters
are authentic and memorable, and her vision is deeply humane.”
—SIGRID NUNEZ
“The story she weaves is one of folklore and fantasy,
mystery, childhood innocence, abandonment, death and disease, all of which have
the ability to hold the reader captive from beginning to end.”
—C.D. VALERE
“[A] vivid, adventurous first book. . . . Tiphanie
Yanique likes the linked story form and explores it with technical
virtuosity. Other stories in this
collection explore the intersection of sex, love, and the sacred, in sentences
as apt as they are fresh.”
—360 MAIN STREET
“Elegant, quiet and sly meditations on love, status, race
and family. . . . Yanique establishes herself as a soul sister to writers such
as Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due.”
—THE BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
“‘Impressive’ and ‘masterful’ are easy words to throw
around, but the plain truth is, debuts like this don’t come along that often. .
. . she may well prove a major new voice in American letters.”
—OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY
“An intriguing collection of stories on off-beat topics
that will pique your curiosity. . . . It’s all about people in tough places,
struggling to find meaning and purpose.
The author’s use of dark humor gives this book a unique flavor.”
—BOOK BARGAINS REVIEW
“An incantatory debut collection with range and depth. .
. . Her postcolonial narratives are nuanced and smart and bold; her eye is both
critical and humane."
—AMERICAN SHORT FICTION
“Yanique’s ravishing and bold first collection, set
mostly in the Caribbean, invokes a chorus of distinctive voices and keeps up a
narrative pace so intriguing and suspenseful you listen eagerly for the next
unfolding of the tale.”
—JANE
CIABATTARI, THE DAILY BEAST
“Every once in a while, one happens upon a book that is
so perfect, so complete, that the thought that it could easily have never come
to one’s attention is almost terrifying. Such is the case with Tiphanie
Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper
Colony.”
—SACRAMENTO BOOK
REVIEW
“In How to Escape
from a Leper Colony, Tiphanie Yanique takes as her subject the outsider,
the immigrant, the uprooted. A boy
from Ghana is transplanted to Brixton, trading his palm-wine-drinking friends
in Accra for new football-playing mates.
A Gambian priest finds friendship in a coffin shop in the Caribbean; a
one-time Pentecostal leaves her birthplace and dons a burka in an effort to win
back her Muslim husband. The stories of these men and women, and the
extraordinary grace and sympathy with which they’re told, serve as urgent,
vivid reminders in this age of displacement and migration, of how powerfully
and urgently each human heart aches for its home.”
—KATHLEEN CAMBOR
“Tiphanie Yanique has written powerful stories, in
luminous prose, that reveal a Caribbean beyond tourist brochures, stories that
tell of human triumphs and failures. A wonderful read.”
